Fate - First Reply Sucker Punch [Elbion College]

[Suleiman Askari]

Keeper Yulia sighed, and quietly to herself said, "This is why my Backroom always stays a mess."

She performed a small incantation and there came a flash and before her appeared a sparrow, blue and spirit-like. She spoke to the conjured familiar, and it held her voice to repeat again, and then she bid the sparrow go and it flew quickly from the Backroom, on its way to rouse physical help.

Now to Svenia, Suleiman, and Marcurio Keeper Yulia said, "There will be time aplenty for the pointing of fingers. But that comes later. First, we must undo the results of this...youthful foolishness."

Suleiman pursed his lips, and the cold blanket of guilt fell hard upon him.

* * * * *

THE HEALER'S CHAMBERS​

Sometimes called the Infirmary, sometimes the Healer's Chambers, sometimes other creative nicknames, nevertheless it was the destination for many Elbion students, whether to mend the smallest cut or to alleviate illness or to remedy injuries even more severe. Accidents happened, practice and experimentation were not without risk, and, indeed, though much more rare, fights had their black, purple, and red rewards tended here. The Chambers were quite large, and there was a section where thick cloth partitions separated beds from one another. Suleiman had been taken here, to one of these beds with the curtains on either side and the walkway before him. He didn't know where Marcurio and his goons had been taken, but it certainly wasn't nearby. Svenia, he thought, was close.

The healer he saw to him, Enoch, was an old man in his fifties, his hair a mix of dark and gray, his face clean shaven, few wrinkles, and a kind smile. They spoke some as he worked, Suleiman sitting on the edge of the bed and Enoch before him.

"So you traveled for how long?"

"Twenty years." And as Enoch's hand, enwreathed in a soft glow, passed over Suleiman's arm, he paused. His hand hovered as he seemed to detect something. "Not harmful..." he murmured, and then to Suleiman he asked, "You said that the fight was all physical, correct?"

"Yes. Well. Almost all physical. What I, uh, suffered was all physical—you know, from the other boys. Svenia used a bit of magic on me to help." Feeling, rightly or wrongly, as though he needed to add more, he said, "I don't like getting punched in the face. So her help was welcome. I needed it."

Enoch considered it some more, and then his lips puckered and his brow lifted in the manner of a man silently impressed. He finished with his work, hardly appearing to have done much (at least, from a witness's point of view, for Suleiman's aches were relieved). "The freshness of the wounds, and their lack of severity, has been a boon. You won't bruise, and by tomorrow you'll have only the memory to trouble you."

"Can I see Svenia?"

Enoch thought for a moment. "I don't see the harm in it. But I'll have to walk you over there." A small edge of a smile, then, as he added, "Wouldn't want you going off for another round at the other lads."

"I've had enough fighting for one day."

"All the same. Let's go."

Svenia Albrecht

 

[Svenia Albrecht]

"That should be better."

She opened her eyes and wiped the sweat from her brow with a trembling hand. The relived nightmare was over now. She hated going to the healers not because of the pain that came before and during, but because it was always filled with echoes of fire and being shattered and remade from the pieces. More in common with the Phoenix than with humanity, was she.

She let out a ragged breath. "Thank you," she said. Her voice was as drawn as the rest of her appeared. She sat up with a twinge where her ribs had been broken. The ghost-memory of pain, the body forced to mend itself but unable to forget.

"It wasn't that bad," the healer said. The woman was ancient and gnarled but still quite spry. The benefit of calling upon the arcane, she supposed. "You've had worse."

Not a question. Of course it would be easy for her to see the ghost of magic plied upon her before. Svenia paled a little remembering - again - the searing agony as the shattered remnants of her hip and left leg shifted within her flesh and were welded together anew. The fire hadn't hurt as badly as the healing had, in the end. Mending her ribs hadn't hurt any less than breaking them had, either.

Magic was not free. Everything had a cost, in blood and bone or elsewise.

"Didn't need the reminder," she said shortly. "But thank you regardless. It has been a while since I hurt that badly." She tried to remember her name and could not. She almost even felt bad for not having marked it, but pain did strange things to people.

"Don't mention it," the elderly mage murmured. "I would caution you against fighting people bigger than you, but you children so seldom listen anyway. And anyway, the consequences of your fiery temper aren't finished yet."

She didn't say anything to that. Fiery temper? She hadn't started any of it and she hadn't raised a hand to anyone until it became clear that the one had something against her personally. Seemingly personal, though she hadn't had time to ask once they had all been whisked away.

A man's voice sounded from beyond the curtains. "Is she mended, Lilian?" Lilian. Of course, how did it slip my mind? She shook her head slowly, lank hair swaying with the motion as Lilian nodded to herself.

"Yes, Enoch. I assume you have one of the others with you?"

She grimaced and wondered which of the other it was.

 

[Suleiman Askari]

"Yes I do," said Enoch, and the curtain was pulled to reveal the healer himself and Suleiman beside him. With glances to the boy and to Svenia he said to them both, "Come to the front of the infirmary in...let's say ten minutes. The Sentinels will escort you from there."

He need not say the destination; Suleiman grimaced slightly and briefly, knowing said destination all too well. The very thought had crossed his mind in the middle of the fight.

Enoch and Lilian departed, and there was left but Suleiman and Svenia, certainly not in the place nor in the condition either wanted to be today, yet here they were regardless. Suleiman before long came to draw in a breath and let out a measured sigh, guilt trickling down his spine no matter the nuances of what all happened, and at last he raised his eyes and met Svenia's.

"Soooo...what can I even say? 'Sorry' isn't going to cut it, huh. You were hurt more than me."

He scratched the back of his neck.

Svenia Albrecht

 

[Svenia Albrecht]

She stared after the retreating back of the two healers, her face unreadable for a moment. She then shook herself, breaking whatever chain of thought was wending its way through her mind. Instead, she turned her head so that she could see Suleiman with her good eye, expression neutral.

"This isn't all your fault," she said after a drawn-out moment long enough to nearly be uncomfortable. "You didn't lay a finger on me. That was... whoever that was, plain and simple." Suleiman had also not been the aggressor in any of what had happened before.

No, that had been the clique of Marcurio and his overweening pride. There was a faint coloring of her cheeks as she thought back to the harsh words she had heaped upon the bastard. But they had only been words and nothing more. It was not anything that gave license to violence.

"I do not know why he kept hitting me," she said after another long moment. She absently rubbed at her chest with a wince. The bones beneath were no longer broken, but the memory of the pain was quite alive.